Instagram Finally Allows Businesses To Schedule Their Posts

Thanks to an API update released today, Instagram is introducing post scheduling to business profiles – finally. The well awaited feature was the thorn in the heel for many community managers and marketers throughout the recent years. Now, after lots of thgird-party attempts to provide the service and so many failures and broken hearts along the media marketing business circles, the social media itself have released what we’ve all been waiting for.

“Starting today (January 30), we are launching three new features on the Instagram Graph API designed to help businesses better manage their organic presence on Instagram. As part of our API changes, we will also be deprecating the older Instagram API Platform over the next two years beginning on July 31, 2018. Please see the full summary below.”

While many have expected the feature to be rolled out in Instagram itself, instead, the support is being added to Instagram’s API – this means that third-party social media software applications like Hootsuite, Sprout Social or SocialFlow will now have access to the functionalities added, which they can then add to their own products. Instagram says the API is available to all of Facebook’s Marketing Partners and Instagram Partners.

For example, HootSuite is one of the first partners to implement the API:

“The scheduling and publishing of Instagram content has been the number one request for our 16 million customers,” said Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, in a statement. “Now, they can manage large volumes of content, multiple team members and multiple Instagram accounts with ease and security. Hootsuite is excited to partner with Instagram to make this happen.”

“It’s always been very time-consuming to create Instagram posts,” SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson told TechCrunch. “That’s not necessarily a problem for individual consumers, but when you’re a media company that creates more than 100,000 posts a month, it’s simply impossible to do everything manually.” Well, at least, it’s something. We’ll be happy to use the feature with Hoot Suite and other apps we use to keep you updated, that’s for sure.